NAFTA

A review of Hugo García Manríquez's 'Anti-Humboldt'

As a bilingual and bicultural individual, I have learned that the vectors that constitute my identity pull me sometimes in different directions depending on which side of the border I’m standing. I embody the challenging experience of engaging in conversation and producing works of literature in my second language. This perspective is always present in my writing; the effects of the binational polarization coming from the imminence of the border are unescapable. When it comes to literature that is written precisely at or in tension with the US/Mexico border, how far do the ripples go?

As a bilingual and bicultural individual, I have learned that the vectors that constitute my identity pull me sometimes in different directions depending on which side of the border I’m standing. I embody the challenging experience of engaging in conversation and producing works of literature in my second language. This perspective is always present in my writing; the effects of the binational polarization coming from the imminence of the border are unescapable.

Translation is trade without commerce

Displacement. Chosen and unchosen migrations. Free and unfree trades. How displacement is also a kind of placement, an unfamiliar vantage point from which to renegotiate terms, terrains, parameters, possibilities. Translation is willing and willful displacement. In moving a word, phrase, line, sentence, stanza, paragraph, idea, framework from the space of one language to the space of another, something utterly transformed is created, and something that is still very deeply (though not essentially) the same as what it was to begin with (which was not immobile in the first place). Alchemy

In a conversation, Sesshu Foster recently referred to the space of translation as “no-man’s land.” I’d agree and also add the idea of “every person’s land,” in the sense that no one and everyone might belong there, or perhaps that the very concept of “belonging” no longer pertains—the question is one of moving through space, rather than claiming it. Of using the terms imposed upon us (as Adrián Esparza uses the typical Mexican blanket sold to tourists, for example) to subvert the intentions of their imposition. To unknit the weave that would bind us.

The scopophilic selfie in the écriture transféminine of Juliana Huxtable's 'Mucous in my Pineal Gland — OR Universal croptops for all the self-cannonized saints of becoming, a screen4screen tribute

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters. Laura Jaramillo asserts that ASMR videos recreate a sensory and sensual materiality lost to the digital work-a-day world.

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters.

Thanks to Erik Redling and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek for organizing Beyond Metrical Prosody: New Rhythms in US and German (Post-) Modern Poetry at Freie Universitat in Berlin. The lively discussion underlined the value of this German/American exchange. I was grateful to learn more about the poetry and short lives of Rolf Dieter Brinkman (1940–1975), as presented by Jan Röhnert, and Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927–1954), presented by Agnes C. Müller. Brinkman translated O’Hara and Berrigan. Olson and Creeley wrote poems for Gerhardt (recordings on PennSound), the editor of FRAGMENTE, a prescient magazine that included them both: MP3 — Olson reading “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things …” in Berlin in 1966 and MP3: Creeley’s 1956 reading of “For Rainer Gerhardt.”

[N.B. To which she adds, in correspondence: “The elephant is a non-predatory mammal, a sensate being. The poem intersects body and spirit — elephant desire, with the function of marketing, production, distribution and exchange of elephant and rhino body parts by human predators.”]